Collaboration in Military Technology Innovation: An Empirical Test of Varieties of Capitalism

Abstract

What causes organizations to collaborate in the development of military technologies? In this article, we evaluate the response to this question offered by Hall and Soskice’s (2001) Varieties of Capitalism (VoC). VoC contends that the institutional configurations of modern capitalist economies push organizations towards country-specific behavioral patterns in terms of collaboration frequency and collaborative network characteristics. We extract these claims and apply them to the empirical setting of military technology patents. Towards this end, we construct an original dataset of military technology innovation and employ novel metrics of historical collaboration stickiness and collaborative network breadth. We find that VoC’s predictions regarding organization-level patterns of collaboration are largely unsupported by the data. However, the VoC prediction that organizations within coordinated-market economies will form collaborative relationships characterized by greater historical persistence than those formed within liberal-market economies holds up to empirical scrutiny.